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Wednesday, October 1, 2014

War against Islamic State: Sowing seeds of more extremist groups

RSIS
Commentary is a platform to provide timely and, where appropriate,
policy-relevant commentary and analysis of topical issues and contemporary
developments. The views of the authors are their own and do not represent the
official position of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, NTU.
These commentaries may be reproduced electronically or in print with prior
permission from RSIS and due recognition to the author(s) and RSIS. Please
email: RSISPublications@ntu.edu.sgfor feedback to the Editor RSIS Commentary, Yang Razali Kassim.

No. 190/2014 dated 30 September 2014

War against Islamic State:Sowing seeds of more
extremist groups

By James M Dorsey

Synopsis

The US-led war against the Islamic State, the jihadist group that controls a
swath of Syria and Iraq, is sowing seeds for the sprouting of yet more
extremist groups. In doing so the US is reverting to a misguided policy that
has spawned more virulent forms of militant Islam.Commentary

The US-led international response to the Islamic State’s advances in Iraq and
Syria is more extensive and fraught with danger than the war on terror declared
by President George W Bush in the wake of the 9-11 attacks on New York and
Washington. It is a response that contains the seeds of continued failure in
confronting terrorism and threatens to give rise to groups that may be even
more extreme than the Islamic State, hard though that may be to imagine.

Bush concluded within weeks of the 9/11 attacks that Al Qaeda was as much a
product of US support for autocratic Arab regimes as it was the result of
politically bankrupt Arab leaders. His acknowledgement amounted to an admission
of failure of a US policy designed to maintain stability in a key geo-strategic
and volatile part of the world.

A decade later, discontent with failed regimes produced popular revolts that
toppled the autocratic leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Elsewhere in
the region, mass protests erupted in Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Oman.
Bahrain’s minority Sunni rulers brutally suppressed a Shia uprising. Egypt’s
transition was routed with a military coup against the Muslim Brotherhood,
backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Syria is in its fourth
year of a bloody civil war that has fuelled the rise of the Islamic State, a
jihadist group that makes Al Qaeda look like a lesser evil.

Multiple problems

The problems with the US-led military offensive against the Islamic State are
many. For one, it turns Clausewitz’ definition of war as an extension of
diplomacy on its head. It reduces what is at its core a political problem that
requires a political solution coupled with a military effort to contain the
Islamic State to a military problem in which politics is an afterthought.

The emphasis on a military solution moreover goes beyond restoring the
principle of endorsement of repressive regimes like those of Saudi Arabia, the
United Arab Emirates and Egypt that are regressive and/or supportive of
ideologies akin to that of the Islamic State, promoters of sectarianism, and
among the worst offenders of human rights. It reinforces perceptions among many
Sunni Muslims that the West first turned a blind eye to the killings in Syria
and now is undermining what is left of credible resistance to the Syrian
regime. Those perceptions are rooted in US expansion of its offensive in Syria
to include Jabhat al-Nusra, a jihadist group aligned with Al Qaeda that is
wholly focused on defeating the Syrian regime but opposed to the Islamic State.

The Obama administration’s alignment with the Middle East’s
counter-revolutionary forces and targeting of groups other than the Islamic
State risks identifying the US with efforts by Saudi Arabia, the United
Arab Emirates and Egypt to target political Islam as such. The three Arab
nations earlier this year cracked down on non-violent groups like the Muslim
Brotherhood. They have since called for an expansion of the campaign against
the Islamic State to include non-violent expressions of political Islam. The US
alignment prevents it from adopting a policy that would seek to contain the
Islamic State militarily while focusing on removing the grievances on which the
group feeds. It is a policy that is destined to at best provide a band aid for
a festering wound.

Saudi and UAE efforts to target political Islam as such were articulated
earlier this year by former British prime minister Tony Blair. Blair argued
against “a deep desire to separate the political ideology represented by groups
such as the Muslim Brotherhood from the actions of extremists including acts of
terrorism.” He acknowledged that it was “laudable” to distinguish “between
those who violate the law and those we simply disagree with” but warned that
“if we're not careful, they also blind us to the fact that the ideology itself
is nonetheless dangerous and corrosive; and cannot and should not be treated as
a conventional political debate between two opposing views of how society
should be governed.”

On that basis, it is hard to see why Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s puritan
interpretation of Islam that is the well spring of much of contemporary
jihadist thinking, does not top the list of ideologies that are “dangerous and
corrosive.” Saudi Arabia, like the Islamic State, was born in a jihadist
struggle that married Islamist warriors led by an 18th century jurist Mohammed
Abdul Wahab, with the proto-kingdom’s ruling Al Saud clan.

A
wake-up call
The rise of the Islamic State is a watershed, a wake-up call for many in the
Arab and the Muslim world desperate for change. It has fuelled a long-overdue
debate among Arabs and Muslims about the kind of world they want to live in.

In an essay earlier this month entitled ‘The Barbarians Within Our Gates,’
prominent Washington-based journalist Hisham Melhelm wrote: “The Arab world
today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism — the
extremism of the rulers and those in opposition — than at any time since the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago… The promise of political
empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded
by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays — all has given way to
civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of
absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms.... The jihadists of the
Islamic State, in other words, did not emerge from nowhere. They climbed out of
a rotting, empty hulk — what was left of a broken-down civilization.”

For his part, Turki al-Hamad, a liberal Saudi intellectual, questioned how
Saudi religious leaders could confront the Islamic State’s extremist ideology
given that they promote similar thinking at home and abroad. Writing in the
London-based newspaper Al Arab, Hamad argued that the Saudi clergy was
incapable of confronting the extremism of groups like the Islamic State “not
because of laxness or procrastination, but because they share the same ideology."

Neither Melhelm nor Hamad are Islamists. Yet, they reflect widespread
soul-searching among Islamists and non-Islamists across the Arab world. Theirs
is a debate that predates the rise of the Islamic State but has been pushed
centre stage by the jihadists. It is a debate that is at the core of tackling
the root causes on which jihadists groups feed. It is a debate that threatens
to be squashed by a policy that focuses on military rather than political
solutions and promotes status quo regimes whose autocracy chokes off
opportunities for the venting of wide-spread discontent and anger, leaving
violence and extremism as one of the few, if not the only, option to force
change.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International
Studies as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the
Institute of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the
blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with
the same title.

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About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile